Frank_ The Voice Part 1

Frank : the voice.

by James Kaplan.

Act One

FRANKIE AND DOLLY

The only two people I've ever been afraid of are my mother and Tommy Dorsey.

-Frank Sinatra

1.

The child is the father to the man: a beautifully formed mouth, an avid blue-eyed gaze. Undated photo of Frank at about six months. (photo credit 1.1) (photo credit 1.1) Araw December Sunday afternoon in 1915, a day more like the old century than the new among the wood-frame tenements and horse-s.h.i.t-flecked cobblestones of Hoboken's Little Italy, a.k.a. Guinea Town. The air smells of coal smoke and imminent snow. The kitchen of the cold-water flat on Monroe Street is full of women, all gathered around a table, all shouting at once. On the table lies a copper-haired girl, just nineteen, hugely pregnant. She moans hoa.r.s.ely: the labor has stalled. The midwife wipes the poor girl's brow and motions with her other hand. A doctor is sent for. Ten long minutes later he arrives, removes his overcoat, and with a stern look around the room-he is the lone male present-opens his black bag. From the shining metallic array inside he removes his dreaded obstetric forceps, a medieval-looking instrument, and grips the baby with it, pulling hard from the mother's womb, in the violent process fearfully tearing the left side of the child's face and neck, as well as its left ear.

The doctor cuts the cord and lays the infant-a boy, huge and blue and bleeding from his wounds, and apparently dead-by the kitchen sink, quickly shifting his efforts to saving the nearly unconscious mother's life. The women lean in, mopping the mother's pallid face, shouting advice in Italian. One at the back of the scrum-perhaps the mother's mother, perhaps someone else-looks at the inert baby and takes pity. She picks it up, runs some ice-cold water from the sink over it, and slaps its back. It starts, snuffles, and begins to howl.

Mother and child both survived, but neither ever forgot the brutality of that December day. Frank Sinatra bore the scars of his birth, both physical and psychological, to the end of his years. A bear-rug-cherubic baby picture shot a few weeks after he was born was purposely taken from his right side, since the wounds on the left side of his face and neck were still angry-looking. Throughout Sinatra's vastly doc.u.mented life, he would rarely-especially if he had anything to do with it-be photographed from his left. One scar, hard to disguise (though frequently airbrushed), ran diagonally from the lower-left corner of his mouth to his jawline. His ear on that side had a bifurcated lobe-the cla.s.sic cauliflower-but that was the least of it: the delicate ridges and planes of his left outer ear were mashed, giving the appearance, in early pictures, of an apricot run over by a steamroller. The only connection between the sonic world and the external auditory meatus-the ear hole-was a vertical slit. Later plastic surgery would correct the problem to some extent.

That wasn't all. In childhood, a mastoid operation would leave a thick ridge of scar tissue on his neck behind the ear's base. A severe case of cystic acne in adolescence compounded his sense of disfigurement: as an adult, he would apply Max Factor pancake makeup to his face and neck every morning and again after each of the several showers he took daily.

Sinatra later told his daughter Nancy that when he was eleven, after some playmates began to call him "Scarface," he went to the house of the physician who had delivered him, determined to give the good doctor a good beating. Fortunately, the doctor wasn't home. Even when he was in his early forties, on top of the world and in the midst of an artistic outpouring unparalleled in the history of popular music, the birth trauma-and his mother-were very much on Sinatra's mind. Once, in a moment of extraordinary emotional nakedness, the singer opened up very briefly to a lover. "They weren't thinking about me," he said bitterly. "They were just thinking about my mother. They just kind of ripped me out and tossed me aside."

He was talking to Peggy Connelly, a young singer whom he met in 1955 and who, for almost three years at the apex of his career, would be as close to him as it was possible for anyone to be. The scene was Madrid, in the spring of 1956: Sinatra was in Spain shooting a movie he had little taste for. One night in a small nightclub, as he and the twenty-four-year-old Connelly sat in the dark at the edge of the dance floor, she caressed his left cheek, but when her fingertips touched his ear, he flinched. She asked him what was wrong, and he admitted he was sensitive about his deformity.

"I really don't think I had ever noticed it, truly," Connelly said many years later. "This was early on in our relationship." Sinatra then went on to spill out the whole story of his birth: his great weight (thirteen and a half pounds), the ripping forceps, the way he'd essentially been left for dead. "There was no outburst of emotion," Connelly recalled. "There was [instead] an obvious lingering bitterness about what he felt had been a stupid neglect of his infant self to concentrate only on [his] mother, intimating that he was sort of 'ripped from her entrails' and tossed aside; otherwise his torn ear might have been tended to."

In the years immediately following the harrowing birth of her only child, Dolly Sinatra seems to have compensated in her own way: she became a midwife and sometime abortionist. For the latter activity she got a nickname ("Hatpin Dolly") and a criminal record. And while she sometimes refused to accept payment for terminating pregnancies, she could afford the generosity: her legitimate business of midwifery, at $50 per procedure, a substantial sum at the time, helped support her family in handsome fashion. Strikingly, two of her arrests, one in late 1937 and one in February 1939 (just three weeks after her son's wedding), neatly bracketed Frank Sinatra's own two arrests, in November and December 1938, for the then-criminal offenses of (in the first case) seduction and (in the second) adultery. Also remarkable is that all these Sinatra arrests were s.e.x related-and that none of them would have occurred today.

What was happening in this family? To begin to answer the question, we have to cast ourselves back into the knockabout Italian streets of Hoboken in the 1920s and 1930s-and into the thoroughly unpsychological household of Dolly and Marty Sinatra. But while it's easy to wonder what effect growing up in such a household could have had on an exquisitely sensitive genius (which Frank Sinatra indisputably was), we must also remember that he was cut from the same cloth as his parents-especially his mother, a woman he seems to have hated and loved, avoided and sought out, in equal measures, throughout his life; a woman whose personality was uncomfortably similar to his own.

The first mystery is what brought two such disparate characters as Natalina Garaventa and Anthony Martin Sinatra together in the first place. Dolly (she acquired the nickname as a little girl, for being so pretty) was, even as a very young woman, loud, relentlessly foulmouthed, brilliant (she had a natural facility for languages), and toweringly ambitious. So-to what kind of star did she imagine she was. .h.i.tching her wagon when she went after (for she must have been the aggressor in the relationship) Marty Sinatra?

For he was a lug: a sweet lug, maybe, but a lug nevertheless. Short, with an obstinate-looking underbite and an early-receding hairline. A fair bantamweight prizefighter (he billed himself as Marty O'Brien, because of the anti-Italian prejudice of the times), frequently unemployed, who sometimes moonlighted as a chauffeur to make ends meet. A little man who had his arms covered in tattoos to try to look tough. Asthmatic; illiterate all his life. And exceedingly stingy with words. In his sixties, Frank Sinatra recalled listening to his parents through the bedroom wall. "Sometimes I'd be lying awake in the dark and I'd hear them talking," he said. "Or rather, I'd hear her talking and him listening. Mostly it was politics or some worthless neighbor. I remember her ranting about how Sacco and Vanzetti were framed. Because they were Italians. Which was probably true. All I'd hear from my father was like a grunt...He'd just say, Eh. Eh."

It's difficult to extract much personality from the few stories told about the elder Sinatra. He seems to have had a wry and quiet sense of humor, and photographs of him as a young man appear to bear this out-it's a sweet, though dim, face. Nancy Sinatra, in Frank Sinatra, My Father Frank Sinatra, My Father, tries to paint her grandfather as a lovable practical joker: There was the time Marty gave a pal a laxative and spread glue on the outhouse toilet seat. And then there was Marty's revenge on a deadbeat barkeep who tried to pay off a debt to him with a sick horse instead of cash: her grandfather, Nancy says, walked the horse to the saloon in the middle of the night and shot it dead in the doorway, leaving the carca.s.s as a discouragement to business.

Rough humor! The joke has a Sicilian tinge to it, and Sicily is where Marty came from, in 1903, aged nine, when he landed at Ellis Island with his mother and two little sisters to join his father, Francesco Sinatra, who-in the common practice of the day-had arrived in America three years earlier to establish himself.

Dolly Garaventa's people were from the north of Italy, near Genoa. And the ancient, deeply held social prejudice on the part of northern Italians toward southerners makes it doubly difficult to imagine what was on her mind when, at sixteen, she set her cap for the eighteen-year-old Marty. Was it irresistible attraction? Or adolescent rebellion-the chance to stick it to her parents, the lure of the bad boy? It's said that little Dolly (she was under five feet, and just ninety pounds) used to disguise herself as a boy to sneak into Marty's prizefights, her strawberry blond hair stuffed into a newsboy cap, a cigar stuck in her mouth: a sweet story, with a ring of truth about it, bespeaking her willfulness, her force. And her originality.

Against her family's outcry (and probably at her urging), the two eloped, ages seventeen and nineteen, and were married at the Jersey City city hall on Valentine's Day (a holiday that would loom large at two junctures in Frank Sinatra's first marriage) 1913. On the marriage certificate, Marty gave his occupation as athlete. In truth, he only ate regularly because his parents owned a grocery store. Soon the couple made it up with her parents, got remarried in the church, and set up housekeeping in the cold-water flat at 415 Monroe Street.

Every family is a mystery, but some are more mysterious than others. After Dolly and Marty Sinatra's only child was born, theirs was a centrifugal household. Family lore says that the birth rendered Dolly unable to have more children, but it seems equally likely she simply decided-she was a decider-she didn't want to go through that that again. Besides, she had many other fish to fry. Her skill with Italian dialects and her fluency in English led her to become a facilitator for new immigrants who had court business, such as trying to get citizenship papers. Her appearances in court brought her to the attention of local Democratic politicians-the Irish bosses of Hoboken-who, impressed by the force of her personality and her connection with the community, saw in her a natural ward leader. Soon she was getting out votes, pet.i.tioning city hall (as part of a demonstration for suffrage in 1919, she chained herself to the building's fence), campaigning for candidates, collecting favors. All the while roaming the streets of Hoboken with her black midwife's bag. again. Besides, she had many other fish to fry. Her skill with Italian dialects and her fluency in English led her to become a facilitator for new immigrants who had court business, such as trying to get citizenship papers. Her appearances in court brought her to the attention of local Democratic politicians-the Irish bosses of Hoboken-who, impressed by the force of her personality and her connection with the community, saw in her a natural ward leader. Soon she was getting out votes, pet.i.tioning city hall (as part of a demonstration for suffrage in 1919, she chained herself to the building's fence), campaigning for candidates, collecting favors. All the while roaming the streets of Hoboken with her black midwife's bag.

It all meant she simply wasn't at home very much. In any case, home wasn't the place for Dolly: she was out out, not in; she had the politician's temperament-restless, energetic, unreflective. And she had unique ideas about child rearing. Of course, to present-day sensibilities filled with the art and science of what we now call parenting, child rearing in the early twentieth century has a distinctly primitive look to it. Poor and lower-middle-cla.s.s families were large, and with the parents either working or simply exhausted, the older children-or the streets-frequently raised the young.

Neither was an option for Frank Sinatra. As an only child in Hoboken in the 1920s and 1930s, he was an anomaly. His mother paid him both too much attention and too little. Having wanted a girl, she dressed him in pink baby clothes. Once he was walking, there were Little Lord Fauntleroy outfits.

He was the apple of his parents' eye and their ball and chain. Dolly had babies or votes to deliver; Marty had things to do. Italian men left the house whether they were employed or not, if only to sit somewhere and sip a beverage with pals. Late in the second decade of the twentieth century, Dolly borrowed money from her family, and she and Marty bought a bar, on the corner of Jefferson and Fourth, which they called Marty O'Brien's. While they ran the place, little Frankie was looked after by his grandmother or a cousin or, most regularly, a nice Jewish neighbor named Mrs. Golden. She taught him Yiddish.

When Dolly was with her son, she alternately coddled him-beautiful clothes continued to be a theme-and abused him. In those days it was known as discipline. The child was spirited, and so was the mother. It's a miracle the child kept his spirit. Dolly once pushed her son down a flight of stairs, knocking him unconscious. She playfully ducked his head under the ocean waves, terrifying him (remarkably, he became an expert swimmer). And most regularly, she hit him with a stick. It was a small bat, actually, something like a policeman's nightstick: it was kept behind the bar at Marty O'Brien's.

"When I would get out of hand," Sinatra told Pete Hamill, "she would give me a rap with that little club; then she'd hug me to her breast."

"She was a p.i.s.ser," he recollected to Shirley MacLaine. "She scared the s.h.i.t outta me. Never knew what she'd hate that I'd do."

If the primary intimacy was up for grabs, so was every subsequent relationship: Sinatra would feel ambivalent about women until the end of his days. He would show every lover something of what Dolly had shown him.

It seems straight out of a textbook: an only child, both spoiled and neglected, praised to the skies and viciously cut down when he fails to please, grows up suffering an infinite neediness, an inability to be alone, and cycles of grandiosity and bottomless depression.

"I think my dad desperately wanted to do the best he could for the people he loved," Tina Sinatra writes, "but ultimately he would do what he needed to do for himself himself. (In that, he was his mother's son.)"

Yet that doesn't quite tell the whole story. Yes, Frank Sinatra was born with a character (inevitably) similar to Dolly's, but nature is only half the equation. Frank Sinatra did what he needed to do for himself because he had learned from earliest childhood to trust no one-even the one in whom he should have been able to place ultimate trust.

And then there is the larger environment in which Sinatra grew up, those knockabout streets of Hoboken during Prohibition and the Depression.

By some accounts, the Square Mile City was a pretty mobbed-up place in those days. Some say even Marty O'Brien's little tavern was a hotbed of crime. We hear about big Mob names like Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel and Joe Adonis and Johnny Torrio and the Fischetti brothers and Longy Zwillman and Willie Moretti and Dutch Schultz and Frank Costello and-of course-Lucky Luciano, who, as fate would have it, was born in the same Sicilian village as Frank Sinatra's grandfather, Lercara Friddi.

What business could all these big cheeses of organized crime possibly have had with the small-time Sinatras of Hoboken? It all had to do (we're told) with liquor. The Mob made millions from rum-running; Dolly and Marty Sinatra bought illegal booze from their lieutenants, or the lieutenants' lieutenants. Poor Marty, it seems, once got hit, knocked unconscious, when he tried to make some pin money riding shotgun for a liquor shipment. The big-time bootlegger Waxey Gordon (identified in Nancy Sinatra's book as "Sicilian-born," which must mean a very odd neighborhood in Sicily, for he was born Irving Wexler) was said to be a regular at Marty O'Brien's.

Meanwhile, by his own later account, little Frankie also hung out at the bar, doing his homework and, now and then at the urging of the clientele, climbing up on top of the player piano to sing a song of the day for nickels and quarters: Honest and truly, I'm in love with you... Honest and truly, I'm in love with you...

It appears that Dolly's brothers Dominick and Lawrence were both involved in shady activity. Both had criminal records; Lawrence, a welterweight boxer under the name Babe Sieger, dabbled in crime, sort of. "He was a hijacker with Dutch Schultz with the whiskey and stuff," Dolly's sister's son recalled, somewhat vaguely. And, of course, Dutch Schultz did business with Lucky Luciano, and we can fill in the blanks from there.

But to understand the effect of organized crime on the evolving psyche of young Frank, we need look no further than Dolly herself-at least if we consider the writings of Mario Puzo.

In 1964, Puzo published his second novel, the highly autobiographical The Fortunate Pilgrim The Fortunate Pilgrim. Critics hailed it as a minor cla.s.sic-much as they had hailed his first book, a World War II novel called The Dark Arena The Dark Arena. After those two books, Puzo, unable to make a living from his writing, decided he was tired of creating minor cla.s.sics. And so he wrote The G.o.dfather The G.o.dfather.

The Fortunate Pilgrim is a beautiful, harrowing story, depicting the travails of an Italian-American family living in h.e.l.l's Kitchen in the depths of the Depression. When the father, the family's breadwinner, has a breakdown and is inst.i.tutionalized, the mother, Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo, takes matters into her own hands, deciding she will not let her six children go hungry or be farmed out to other households. She learns how to earn a living; she holds the family together by the sheer force of her will. is a beautiful, harrowing story, depicting the travails of an Italian-American family living in h.e.l.l's Kitchen in the depths of the Depression. When the father, the family's breadwinner, has a breakdown and is inst.i.tutionalized, the mother, Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo, takes matters into her own hands, deciding she will not let her six children go hungry or be farmed out to other households. She learns how to earn a living; she holds the family together by the sheer force of her will.

The book was based on Puzo's own childhood, and he would later make an amazing admission: he had based the character of Vito Corleone, the G.o.dfather, on the very same person who had been the model for Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo-his own mother. Just like Lucia Santa and Don Corleone, Mother Puzo had been benevolent but calculating, slow to anger but quick to decide: the ultimate strategist.

Like Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo, Dolly Sinatra managed, by sheer force of will, to make a life for her little family in the years leading up to, and into the teeth of, the Depression. It wasn't easy.

She was a politician and a master strategist: endlessly ambitious, fiercely determined, utterly pragmatic. She was also abusive, violent, and vengeful. It was quite a different version of the G.o.dfather from Mario Puzo's. But it was a cogent version nonetheless. Frank Sinatra may have grown up with Fischettis down the street, Dutch Schultz around the corner, Waxey Gordon on the next bar stool at Marty O'Brien's, but he had his own model for a Mafia chief right inside his house. Small wonder that when he eventually met the real thing, he felt a shot of recognition, an instant pull. And small wonder that when the real mafiosi met Sinatra, they smiled as they shook his hand. It wasn't just his celebrity; celebrities were a dime a dozen. It was that part of Dolly that her son always carried with him: his own inner G.o.dfather. He both wanted to be one of them and-in spirit and in part-really was.1 A heavy hand. "She scared the s.h.i.t outta me," Sinatra recollected to Shirley MacLaine. "Never knew what she'd hate that I'd do." Frank and Dolly on a trip to the Catskills, circa 1926. (photo credit 1.2) (photo credit 1.2)

2.

First Communion, 1924. (photo credit 2.1) (photo credit 2.1) Even with Dolly's Napoleonic drive, moving up from Guinea Town was no simple matter. She and Marty endured 415 Monroe Street for fourteen years, Frankie, almost twelve. A long time.

Toward the end of their tenure there, another joined them.

It was a strange little menage, the precise sleeping arrangements lost to history: Dolly and Marty in one bed, Frankie in another, and somewhere Marty's cousin from the Old Country, one Vincent Mazzola. In her memoir, Tina Sinatra remembers "Uncle Vincent, a tiny, darling man with a severe limp from World War I, where he'd earned a Purple Heart. With no family of his own, he'd lived with my grandparents since the late thirties."

In fact, according to a family friend, it was a dozen years earlier, around 1926, when Vincent Mazzola moved into the little flat with Dolly and Marty and Frankie. Mazzola's mysterious nickname was Chit-U. n.o.body seems to know what it meant, but one wonders if it was in any way related to citrullo citrullo, an Italian word for simpleton, or fool. (Or a crude joke-s.h.i.t-you-pants?) In any event, Chit-U seems not to have had much going on upstairs. In all likelihood he was sh.e.l.l-shocked.

His arrival at Monroe Street came at a particularly inopportune moment for the family: Marty could no longer box, having broken both wrists in the ring,1 and had lost his job as a boilermaker because of his asthma. Between the fees she earned from midwifery and abortion and a weekend job dipping chocolates in a candy store, Dolly was holding the Sinatras' fortunes together. Imagine her delight at having to take in a slow-witted cripple. and had lost his job as a boilermaker because of his asthma. Between the fees she earned from midwifery and abortion and a weekend job dipping chocolates in a candy store, Dolly was holding the Sinatras' fortunes together. Imagine her delight at having to take in a slow-witted cripple.

But she pulled up her socks and put Chit-U to work, using her political influence in the Third Ward to get him a job on the docks. Every week, he meekly handed his paycheck to her. She also took out a life-insurance policy on the little man, listing herself as the beneficiary.

And not long after setting Cousin Vincent to work, she got busy with Marty, marching to city hall and calling in some Democratic Party chits to demand for her husband a coveted spot in the Hoboken Fire Department. Since the HFD (a) was predominantly Irish and (b) required a written test of all applicants, and since Marty Sinatra was (a) Irish in nickname only and (b) illiterate, one would imagine his chances to have been slim. But no no, to Dolly Sinatra, was an inaudible syllable. Presto, Marty was a fireman! And now, with her husband established in a rock-solid and well-paying (and as a bonus, not excessively labor-intensive) position, and Chit-U's income from the docks added to Marty's pay and Dolly's own, escape from Guinea Town was at long last possible.

He was a lonely boy, by turns timid and overa.s.sertive. He desperately wanted to be "in"-part of a gang or group of any sort. Pampered and overprivileged, he used the money Dolly gave him to try to buy friendship with gifts, with treats. Still, as in the early Hal Roach Our Gang Our Gang films in which the prissily dressed stock character of the rich boy is pushed into mud puddles, he was mocked: for his outfits, his oddity. films in which the prissily dressed stock character of the rich boy is pushed into mud puddles, he was mocked: for his outfits, his oddity.

And his emotionalism. He would never be one of the cool kids-he was hot, and his anger and laughter and tears came too easily.

Yet this was not the rich boy in Our Gang Our Gang. The damaged left ear was clearly visible, as was a scar at the top of the philtrum. This was a face to be reckoned with-a startling face, not least because of the similarity to what it would become; but also in itself: serene, mischievous, beautiful. Late in life Sinatra told a friend that as a child he had heard the music of the spheres.

He may have been timid and babyish and spoiled; he may even, as some accounts suggest, have played with dolls as late as age twelve. But he seems from early years to have had the strong sense that he was Someone-a sense that would have been encouraged by the material things lavished on him, and undercut by the attention that was denied. Not to mention the billy club.

Still, if there's any truth to the idea of victims' identifying with the oppressor, it can be found in young Frank Sinatra's face. Dolly wanted and expected things: things material and immaterial, possessions and power. She wanted the world. Her son may have been uncertain of the ground he walked on where she was concerned, but if there was one thing he was absolutely sure of, it was that he had big things coming to him.

And in early adolescence (just as his family was beginning to bootstrap itself out of the ghetto) he began to dress the part. Frankie had a charge account at the local department store, Geismar's, and a wardrobe so fabulous that he acquired a new nickname: "Slacksey O'Brien." A lesser boy might have become just a well-tailored layabout, a Hoboken vitellone vitellone, but young Frank's splendor was much more than skin-deep. And his large sense of himself derived not only from his identification with Dolly's voracious sense of ent.i.tlement but also from the Secret he entertained, the sounds he heard in his head.

In September 1927 the Sinatras made their big move east, from Monroe Street across the super-significant border of Willow Avenue and into a three-bedroom apartment, at $65 a month, in a German-Irish neighborhood on the tony-sounding Park Avenue.2 Later in life, Frank Sinatra liked to foster the impression that he'd led a pretty rough-and-tumble boyhood among the street gangs of Hoboken. More likely, he spent his early years dodging the gibes and brickbats of the tougher boys of Guinea Town. Now, however, he and his family had crossed a crucial line, into their new life in the high-rent district: every morning, Marty went off to the firehouse to roll up his sleeves (revealing those impressively tattooed arms) and play pinochle; Dolly roamed Hoboken with her black bag; Chit-U limped off to the docks (in his spare time, he limped around the new apartment, mopping and dusting); and Frankie, once school was done for the day (thank G.o.d-he hated every minute of it), dreamed by the radio. Later in life, Frank Sinatra liked to foster the impression that he'd led a pretty rough-and-tumble boyhood among the street gangs of Hoboken. More likely, he spent his early years dodging the gibes and brickbats of the tougher boys of Guinea Town. Now, however, he and his family had crossed a crucial line, into their new life in the high-rent district: every morning, Marty went off to the firehouse to roll up his sleeves (revealing those impressively tattooed arms) and play pinochle; Dolly roamed Hoboken with her black bag; Chit-U limped off to the docks (in his spare time, he limped around the new apartment, mopping and dusting); and Frankie, once school was done for the day (thank G.o.d-he hated every minute of it), dreamed by the radio.

It was the centerpiece of any bourgeois or aspiring-bourgeois household in the mid-1920s: the more elaborate and fine-furniture-like, the better. And the Sinatras owned not just one radio but two. For eleven-year-old Frankie had his own bedroom (at a time when entire families in Hoboken slept in a single room) and his very own At.w.a.ter Kent, an instrument he would later recall resembling "a small grand piano."

Radio was just coming into its own as a medium. The linkage of local transmitters by telephone lines had led, in 1926 and 1927, to the formation of the first two networks, NBC and CBS. Suddenly a wondrous world of faraway news, drama, and sports opened up, emanating from the magical cabinet. Alone in his bedroom, young Frankie would have listened hungrily, pa.s.sionately. But to his ears, the most miraculous sounds of all were musical: the operatic voices of Lauritz Melchior and Lily Pons and Amelita Galli-Curci; the jazz rhythms of the Roger Wolfe Kahn and Ted Fio Rito and Paul Whiteman orchestras.

And then there were the crooners.

The recent perfection of the electronic microphone had led to a sea change in the art of popular singing. Music had been recorded since the 1870s and broadcast since 1920, but prior to 1924 singers had to project through megaphones or into acoustical microphones that provided scarcely greater amplification than cardboard cones. The art of popular singing had therefore been an art of projection, and higher voices-female or tenor-simply carried better.

Now with the modern microphones came a new generation of baritones, men who leaned in and sang softly, intimately, to millions of listeners. There was Gene Austin and Art Gillham and Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards (later the voice of Jiminy Cricket) and Rudy Vallee and Russ Columbo. But most startlingly, there was Bing Crosby.

Crosby, out of Spokane, Washington, had come up through vaudeville, singing as part of a trio called the Rhythm Boys, first with Paul Whiteman, then with the Gus Arnheim Orchestra. But Crosby quickly overshadowed his singing partners-and then even the orchestras that accompanied him-by bringing something entirely new to the art of the popular song: himself.

Prior to the age of the new microphone, popular singing had been, of necessity, a declamatory art: singers literally had to reach the back rows. Crosby's idol, Al Jolson, electrified the Jazz Age with his overpowering pipes and incandescent theatricality. Artifice was an essential part of show business.

The new crooners were more laid-back, but equally artificial. Under the old show-business conventions, a certain remove from the audience, in the form of "cla.s.siness," as exemplified by heightened diction, was a quality to be cultivated. Bing Crosby captured America's heart as no entertainer had ever done before by removing the remove, by seeming the most common of men.

Of course he wasn't that by a long shot. He was a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, a single figure as transforming of the American cultural landscape as Jolson had been, and as Frank Sinatra himself-or Elvis Presley, or Bob Dylan-would be in decades to come. Crosby was, first and foremost, a musical genius, a quality that underlay all his other contradictions, which were plentiful. He was a Jesuit-educated intellectual and a ne'er-do-well; he was at once lovably warm and unreachably cool. He was, with his English-Irish background and ice blue eyes, the whitest of white men and, with his fondness for hard liquor (and, now and then, marijuana) and his incomparable talents for melodic and rhythmic improvisation, a great jazz musician to the core of his being. As Artie Shaw memorably put it: "The thing you have to understand about Bing Crosby is that he was the first hip white person born in the United States."

In other words, Crosby came along (as Elvis would a quarter century later) at precisely the tick of time when the vast white music-listening audience of the United States was primed for hipness-as long as it came in white form. As Gary Giddins reminds us in his superb biography of Bing, A Pocketful of Dreams A Pocketful of Dreams, the definition of jazz in the Jazz Age was far looser than it would come to be later: witness the above-mentioned Kahn, Fio Rito, and Whiteman orchestras, which were stately and lily-white but agreeably peppy.

Meanwhile, truly transformational musicians, both black and white-the likes of Fletcher Henderson, Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, Bubber Miley, Chick Webb, and Benny Goodman-were creating genuine jazz. It was an age of intense cross-fertilization in popular music, and an age of great excitement, when anyone who was paying attention could hear new and wonderful things.

And Bing Crosby had big ears, literally and figuratively. He heard jazz, and for a few years at the beginning of his career he projected something earthshakingly new through the speakers of those Zeniths and Crosleys and Philcos, something that set him quite apart from all the other crooners.

First came the voice itself, deep and rich and masculine, though not ostentatiously so. Crosby was also pitch-perfect and wonderfully adventurous rhythmically-but again, these are the last things most listeners would have noticed. What was most thrilling about Bing Crosby's voice to radio listeners of the 1920s and 1930s was its warmth and directness: unlike other singers, who seemed to be contriving a character as they vocalized, Crosby appeared to be himself himself, speaking straight to the listener in the most casual possible way. It sounded almost as if he were making up the song on the spot.

How did he accomplish this? Remarkably, his Jesuit education had much to do with it. Crosby had been born with a gift for language and a love for words, qualities that were especially encouraged at Spokane's Gonzaga High and Gonzaga University. Giddins writes: "Bing Crosby is the only major singer in American popular music to enjoy the virtues of a cla.s.sical education...Cla.s.ses in elocution, in which he excelled, taught him not only to enunciate a lyric but to a.n.a.lyze its meaning. At Gonzaga High, education was idealized in the phrase eloquentia perfecta eloquentia perfecta (perfect eloquence). Students coached in literature were expected to attain rhetorical mastery as well." (perfect eloquence). Students coached in literature were expected to attain rhetorical mastery as well."

Crosby did well in his studies; at the same time, he was a deeply ambivalent student who, lured by popular music's siren call, dropped out of his pre-law course at Gonzaga in his senior year to go on the road-for the rest of his life, as it turned out. His intellectual half-heartedness forever saved him from pedantry and lent a sense of playfulness to his verbal theatrics.

That he was smart and funny on his own terms raised him above the pack. The popular music of Crosby's early career was a very mixed bag, containing both great standards that would endure the test of time and some of the schmaltziest tunes ever written. As Bing approached the peak of his movie success in the 1930s, he would have the power and the good sense to simply command his songwriters to leave out the schmaltz. Early on, though, he had to sing plenty of it. This is where his fabled coolness stood him in good stead: Crosby possessed the unique ability to make a number like "Just One More Chance" ("I've learned the meaning of repentance/Now you're the jury at my trial") work by sounding wholehearted and ever so slightly skeptical at the same time.

The effect was electric. To women, he sounded romantic, vulnerable, and faintly mysterious; to men, he conveyed emotions without going overboard. He was one of them: a man man, not some brilliantined eunuch. And the seeming casualness of his vocal style made every man feel he could sing like Bing.

Little Frankie was no exception. But he came by the idea honestly: as it happened, both his parents could also sing. Marty had wooed Dolly by serenading her with an old-fashioned number called "You Remind Me of the Girl Who Used to Go to School with Me." For her part, Dolly used to love to gussy herself up on Sat.u.r.day nights, bounce around to Hoboken's many political meetings, get loaded on beer, and warble "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" over and over and over again. No wonder Frankie got up on the piano at the bar.

Still, Crosby's influence on him cannot be underestimated. The period of Bing's explosion into the American consciousness, propelled by radio's beginnings as a truly ma.s.s phenomenon, precisely coincided with Frank Sinatra's emergence as a s.e.xual being. There he was alone in his room, just him and his radio-with that voice that voice coming out of it. (Talk about masculine role models: poor grunting Marty couldn't have compared well.) Anyone who came of age in the early 1960s, hearing Dylan and the Beatles for the first time, can remember the feeling: There you are with your hormones aboil, and someone is speaking, really speaking, to you...And if that someone who's speaking happens to possess genius, interesting things percolate in your mind. coming out of it. (Talk about masculine role models: poor grunting Marty couldn't have compared well.) Anyone who came of age in the early 1960s, hearing Dylan and the Beatles for the first time, can remember the feeling: There you are with your hormones aboil, and someone is speaking, really speaking, to you...And if that someone who's speaking happens to possess genius, interesting things percolate in your mind.

Even in early adolescence, Frank Sinatra's mind was an exceedingly interesting one. He was already aware of something that set him apart from others his age: an inner riot of constantly flowing emotions, happy to sad to miserable to ecstatic to bored, sometimes all within the s.p.a.ce of a minute, each shift hanging on the precise character of the daylight, the look of the clouds, a sharp sound in the street, the smell of the page of a comic book...He might have been ashamed of his inner chaos at times-weren't these kinds of feelings for girls?-or he might've been proud. In any case, he kept this part of himself to himself.3 As-for now-he kept secret the thrill he felt at the sound of Crosby's voice, couched in the certainty that Bing was speaking to him speaking to him. In fact, in the case of Crosby and Sinatra, genius was speaking to genius-though in Sinatra's case, the genius was very much nascent. Frank Sinatra was a slow bloomer. With his feet rooted firmly in the soil of New Jersey. When a Life Life magazine writer asked him, in the early 1970s, if he could recall the first time he ever sang in public, Sinatra said, "I think it was at some hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Late 20s...I probably sang 'Am I Blue?' and I probably got paid a couple of packs of cigarettes and maybe a sandwich." magazine writer asked him, in the early 1970s, if he could recall the first time he ever sang in public, Sinatra said, "I think it was at some hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Late 20s...I probably sang 'Am I Blue?' and I probably got paid a couple of packs of cigarettes and maybe a sandwich."

Which begs the question of those piano-top performances at Marty O'Brien's, but still-he was singing. Unlike school, this was something he could do.

In June 1931, he graduated from Hoboken's David E. Rue Junior High School; around that same time-perhaps as a graduation present-his mother, always looking to boost his popularity, bought him a used Chrysler convertible for $35. That fall, she had reason to regret her generosity: after a mere forty-seven days' attendance at A. J. Demarest High, Frankie either dropped out or, as he later claimed-probably in another attempt to bolster his bad-boy credentials-was expelled, "for general rowdiness." He was not quite sixteen.

According to some sources, Dolly, who'd dreamed of Frankie's becoming a doctor or a civil engineer, was furious. "If you think you're going to be a G.o.dd.a.m.ned loafer, you're crazy!" she is said to have screamed. According to other accounts, however, Dolly was unperturbed ("Her way of thinking," a niece recalled, "was that Italians didn't need an education to get a job"), even if Marty's plans for his son to attend Stevens Inst.i.tute had hit a rough patch. In any case, somebody was disappointed.

If Frank Sinatra's boyhood were a movie, a continuing visual theme would have to be Dolly marching around Hoboken, her firm jaw set, bent on accomplishing for the powerless males around her what they seemed unable to accomplish for themselves. This time she marched straight over to the offices of the Jersey Observer Jersey Observer and b.u.t.tonholed Frankie's G.o.dfather and namesake, the and b.u.t.tonholed Frankie's G.o.dfather and namesake, the Observer Observer's circulation manager, Frank Garrick, refusing to leave the premises until she had secured for her son a job bundling newspapers on a delivery truck.4 A famous story ensues: Frankie, restless and smart and intellectually ambitious, though also possessing a strong streak of intellectual laziness, didn't like bundling newspapers on a delivery truck. Instead, he got it into his head that he would prefer to be a sportswriter. Not become a sportswriter-be a sportswriter. And so one day, after some poor cub reporter on the a sportswriter. And so one day, after some poor cub reporter on the Observer Observer's sports desk got himself killed in a car wreck, Dolly ordered her thoroughly unqualified son to march into Garrick's office and demand the job. Not finding Garrick present, Frankie went over to the dead boy's desk and simply sat down, doing things he imagined an actual sportswriter might do: sharpening pencils, filling the glue pot-everything, in short, but writing about sports.

When the Observer Observer's editor saw Frankie at the dead kid's desk, he quite reasonably asked him what he was doing there. Frankie responded that Mr. Garrick had given him the job. The editor asked Mr. Garrick if this was the case. Garrick said it was not. The editor told Frank Garrick to let Sinatra go. More likely-with what one knows of editors, and the time and the territory-he told him to let the lying little son of a b.i.t.c.h go.

Garrick regretfully informed his G.o.dson that he, Frankie, had put him in an untenable position, and that it would be impossible for him, Frankie, to stay in the Observer Observer's employ.

Whereupon Frankie lost it.